Big Bang Press: Only a few hours left to pre-order books on Kickstarter!!

Sorry I've been kind of absent for the past few weeks -- I've been busy running the Kickstarter for Big Bang Press, a crowdfunding campaign to publish three awesome original novels by fanfic authors. We're mostly doing this through pre-sales, so basically backers just pre-order a book, and that pays for us to do all the publishing and publicity stuff! You can learn more about BBP on our Kickstarter page or website, but here's the lowdown on the three books themselves. Click on the titles for more info, and to read excerpts from each book.

Savage Creatures by Natalie Wilkinson (febricant), is a dark, twisted urban fantasy story taking place in a version of Europe not too far from our own. Shapeshifter Francis Harding is forced to hire a decidedly disreputable investigator to help track down his missing sister. Described by the author as “a book about terrible people being terrible to each other,” Savage Creatures is a grippingly weird psychological thriller.

Juniper Lane by Kady Morrison (gyzym), is a lyrical and clever literary fiction romance about two young women navigating life in suburban hell. In the words of our Editor-in-Chief, Morgan Leigh Davies, “Basically, this book is Jonathan Franzen if Jonathan Franzen were a queer woman with a heart and a sense of humor that hadn’t been corroded by decades of profound misery and bitterness about the world.”

A Hero at the End of the World by Erin Claiborne (eleveninches), is a hilarious satire on “chosen one” narratives in Young Adult fantasy fiction. You know the drill: a teen boy is prophecied to defeat the Dark Lord and save the world. The only problem is: he doesn’t. After a lifetime of being told he’s the Chosen One, Ewan Mao chickens out at the last minute, and his best friend Oliver ends up killing the Dark Lord instead. Five years later, Oliver is a celebrity while Ewan works in a coffee shop and still lives with his parents. That is, until a magical cult tracks Ewan down and offers him an intriguing way to earn back his hero status.

All three novels are by talented fanfic authors who want to make the leap into original fiction publishing, without abandoning their fandom roots. The cover art will be drawn by three fanartists: hydrae (A Hero at the End of the World), quaedam (Juniper Lane) and longerrpigs (Savage Creatures), along with extra interior illustrations as per our $45,000 stretch goal, which we've already reached! If we manage to hit $50,000 before the Kickstarter closes, we'll include signed bookplates in every physical book, as an exclusive upgrade for everyone who supported us on Kickstarter. :D

Why you should back Big Bang Press on Kickstarter
With just a few hours left before the end of our KS campaign, we’ve raised enough money from pre-orders to get all three books published and pay for extra interior illustrations. However! Pledging on Kickstarter isn’t just about funding these books. Every single reward level, from $1 to our top reward at $1000+, offers exclusive content that will NEVER be available to ordinary readers who buy the books in stores later on. Our most popular rewards include:

• Behind-the-scenes commentary packs with exclusive story content from the authors, character sheets for each book, sketches from the illustrators, and letters from the publishing team.
• Personalised postcard updates from the authors.
• Up to 10,000 words of extra writing (ie, a short story) from each of the authors.
• Art prints.
• A MYSTERY BOX containing personal gifts from every individual at BBP.

And that’s just a handful of the rewards we’re offering! To learn more, check out our Kickstarter page. Over 1000 people have backed BBP so far, with the most popular reward being $25: all three ebooks, plus exclusive backer updates. We’ve seen a lot of support from the fandom community so far (our books have already inspired fanart!), along with some pretty flattering media attention from blogs and news sites like io9, HelloGiggles and Book Business magazine.

The Kickstarter campaign ends at 1.43am EST, Sunday Dec. 22. That means there’s still time to become a backer! And even if you can’t afford anything right now, you can still support these books by sharing links on social media and reblogging this post on Tumblr to spread the word.

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Agents of SHIELD: It's actually good now!?

Previously on Agents of SHIELD.

Since there's no episode of Agents of SHIELD this week, I thought now would be to catch up with my reviews. Sorry I haven't posted in a while! I've been busy launching a publishing press that prints and publicises original novels by talented fanfic authors. You should check us out! There are book excerpts on our website (young adult satire! queer romance lit! urban fantasy noir!), alongside cover art and info about why a project like this is such a good idea for people in fandom.

If you don't watch AoS, or if you (understandably) lost interest after a few episodes, then you really need to reevaluate your decision because this show has improved A LOT. I have no idea what happened between episodes 5 and 6, but if you read any of my earlier reviews, you'll know that I was very critical of the first half of the season. Now I'm wondering just what the hell was going on, because a switch flipped during episode 6 and the show has been steadily improving ever since. Here's my rundown of the season so far:

• Episode 1: Entertaining, for a pilot episode (and I usually hate pilots).
• Episodes 2-5: Increasingly frustrating, both in terms of general quality (dialogue, characterisation, episodic storylines, etc) and as a sci-fi/genre show. Almost no worldbuilding, character development, or emotionally compelling scenes. There is no way I would've kept watching, if not for Clark Gregg + the Marvel connection.
• Episode 6: Suddenly?? Actual emotions are happening?? Agent Ward almost does something interesting enough for me to stop hoping he'll drop dead, and FitzSimmons are brilliant.
• Episode 7: Super fun. Simmons and Skye get to be hilarious together. SHIELD Agent Victoria Hand is introduced, and I greatly enjoy the fact that she is much taller than Coulson. We FINALLY get two of the main things I was hoping for: a real look at SHIELD's unethical behaviour as a quasi-governmental organisation, and some details of the inner workings of SHIELD HQ.
• Episode 8: Directed by Jonathan Frakes (!?) AKA Commander Riker from Star Trek: TNG, and director of two Star Trek movies. Real, solid links to the Marvel movie universe, played out in an interesting and reasonably unpredictable way. Ward and May hook up, to my utter astonishment. More on that later.

Which brings us to the most recent episode, "Repairs," a ghost story that finally makes good on the expectations I had for Agents of SHIELD in the first place. I'm actually quite stunned by how quickly this show transformed from being almost unwatchable (unless you're a seriously involved Marvel fan or a small child) to being smart and entertaining. And that's down to a sudden change in not just one, but multiple aspects of the show.

Team Building
Even though Joss Whedon is only distantly attached to AoS, it was definitely marketed as a Whedonverse show. As a result, people had certain expectations. Whedonverse shows have snappy dialogue and a smart balance between geeky humour and depth of emotion, but most importantly, they always focus on groups of misfits coming together to form an extraordinary team or family. On a superficial level, the first episode of Agents of SHIELD really did look like it was heading in this direction. Coulson brought together the team like Ocean's Eleven, there was an interesting mix of personality types, and everyone was just as photogenic as your average Whedon show.

However, for the next four episodes they stalled out. Either the team relationships didn't develop at all, or the characters were put in scenarios where they acted like they'd known each other for months, even when we'd seen little to no believable bonding onscreen. They were stuck in limbo between "too close" and "too distant," with few human touches no social middle-ground. With the exception of May and Coulson, most of the team interactions for the first five episodes felt oddly false, so I was surprised by the number of people I saw posting on the Tumblr tag about how much they loved the relationships in AoS. That is, until I realised that most of those fans were either a) very young, or b) not really talking about canon.

We all love found-family stories, and we're so used to reading fanfic or watching TV shows about snarkily affectionate teams that sometimes, we end up extrapolating that dynamic onto relationships that haven't yet been formed in canon. Two recent examples are Teen Wolf and The Avengers. A lot of Teen Wolf fanfic has the main cast of characters acting like a wolf pack full of affectionate, familial relationships, whereas the canonical characters are all split into antagonistic factions who only grudgingly trust each other for short periods of time. The Avengers is slightly different because in many of the comic books, they are really close as a team. But at the time of the 2012 movie, the team are all essentially strangers to each other, and are yet to move in together at Stark Tower. As a result, there was always a pretty big gap between the Avengers team I wanted, and the one that actually existed in "reality".
Obviously I have zero problem with this happening in fanfic because, you know, that's the whole point of fanfic. I just find it kind of baffling to see people reinterpreting canon to fit in with those ideas, but IDK, each to their own. The result with AoS was that until the last handful of episodes, there was a significant divide between the "real" character relationships, and the alternate versions that existed e inside many people's minds. (An imaginary show that I personally would've preferred to be watching, because it sounded way better than the one onscreen.) Luckily, after nine episodes we've finally reached that point in canon. The team now have a believably casual rapport, and they've been through enough perilous situations together that they've had a chance to bond in a realistic way.

Unpredictability

I never had high expectations of AoS being a world-class thriller or boasting the same quality of dramatic writing as, say, Battlestar Galactica or The Good Wife. Still, the first five episodes were so predictable as to be actively frustrating, and that's despite the fact that I personally enjoy this sort of combination between sci-fi and heist caper story elements. The most frustrating episode was "The Girl in the Flower Dress," which focused on a storyline so ancient and stupidly sexist that it seemed like the kind of thing most Whedonverse shows are parodying in the first place. A 30-year-old "girl" acting as a honey trap to seduce an innocent everyman into a life of crime, only for him to be shot down by the Good Guys while she escapes to be sexy and evil another day. In a general sense I'm actually quite interested to see how the Project Centipede story arc pans out, but this was not a good way to introduce it. ("The Girl in the Flower Dress" was one of the only two episodes that was both written and directed exclusively by men, BTW.)
"F.Z.Z.T." (1x06) won me over because it convinced me that they might actually kill off Simmons. Because Fitz and Simmons are the only characters with a pre-existing relationship, they were the ideal choice for the first majorly dangerous scenario of the season. When this episode aired, I remember a friend and I basically being like, "Holy shit, I can't believe this crappy show actually made me tear up." The alien virus was a Chekov's Gun that had to endanger someone by the end of the episode, but the way the story unfolded was satisfyingly unpredictable and emotionally engaging.
My favourite recent development is the May/Ward fuckbuddy relationship, which pleases me on many, many different levels. First of all there's the fact that it makes sense. Neither of them has the time (or the inclination, I suspect) for a serious romantic relationship at the moment, which was one of the reasons why I was dreading the possibility of a Skye/Ward romance. Luckily, the May/Ward thing seriously limits the likelihood of Skye/Ward EVER happening, which frees up Skye to take on a role I've been hoping for from the start: the "kid" of the team, with Coulson as her surrogate dad. I really enjoyed the scene where Skye says that May needs to get laid, and Ward is just like, "..." Sometimes, Skye can be SUCH a tween.

AoS has a surprisingly great attitude toward casual sex, particularly when you remember that the first half of the season felt like a kids' show. May and Ward have an unspoken bond because they're a pair of trained killers in a team of relatively naiive young "civilian" agents, and because they went through the same experience with the Asgardian staff in episode 8. But it's not a romantic bond, and their interactions are never filmed in a ~sexy way, unlike with Skye and her hacker boyfriend, where it made more sense. Finally, it's nice to see such a mature and in-character depiction of a older woman/younger man dynamic. Good luck finding a TV relationship like this where it isn't either played for laughs and/or cougar-related drama, or accompanied by a ton of gratuitous sex scenes.

It took me a long time to warm to Ward because TV is already riddled with good-looking, angsty white male heroes. He's just so unbearably generic. The revelation that he'd had a ~bad childhood~ was the nail in the coffin for me, because it's Hollywood's go-to excuse for the shitty behaviour of every angsty white male action hero of the past bazillion years. It got to the point where I was actively annoyed whenever he came onscreen, because it felt like he was taking up a space that could've been given to a far more interesting type of character. He seemed like a typical example of that thing where family-friendly shows create a flippant, "safe" depiction of a character who, in reality, should be complex and horrifying and not particularly likeable. Ward is a trained killer who works for a morally ambiguous organisation, outside the civilian legal system. The show was treating him like he was a repressed-but-charming jock.

Links to Marvel movie canon

Marvel movieverse stuff in AoS was always going to be an optional extra, rather than a major component of the show. I understand that it's tricky to include many details without messing with canon that's being written by someone else, not to mention the legal issues involved with including anything from the comics. Still, I was hoping that AoS would at least give us a taste of how everyday people are reacting to the superheroic and/or alien additions to their world. Too bad there was probably more of that in the actual Avengers movie than in episodes 2-5 of this show.
I doubt you'll be surprised to learn that I loved the Thor: The Dark World episode. The Asgardian cult were relatively believable (given, you know, the ridiculous subject-matter), and the actual Asgardian guy was hilarious. Not only was he the polar opposite of warrior characters like Thor and Sif, but they added this brilliant detail of him just being this... gross old sex-pest professor who creepily hits on younger women all the time. I really hope he comes back at some point. And I'll be interested to see if Ward's anger issues end up being a recurring thing, because they're definitely the most interesting thing that's happened with him so far. The scene where shirtless Ward freaked out at Skye and FitzSimmons was especially good, because you could really feel the combination of masculine rage-panic (Ward) and fear (everyone else) in the enclosed space of the lab.

In future episodes, I'm hoping to see more of the outside world, and the way normal civilians are experiencing the supernatural (or at least, pseudo-scientifically supernatural) events of the Avengers franchise. I could do with more ~superhero fans~ for example, although the villagers-with-pitchforks scenario of episode 9 was great as well.

Miscellaneous

• This didn't really fit into any of my categories, but I SUPER LOVE Melinda May now. LOVE HER. Also, her interactions with Coulson are hilarious. He just... talks and talks. And talks. While she stands there and twitches like 0.5 of her facial muscles in long-suffering bemusement. They have such great chemistry.
• I got WAY too into the "Did I fall asleep?"/"For a little while," exchange in Coulson's dream sequence last week. Realistically I know ths was just a bit of fan-pandering rather than a hint of a serious link to Dollhouse, but I loved it anyway. Whenever someone on TV asks, "Did I fall asleep?" I always expect the answer to be "For a little while," so it was gratifying to see it actually happen, for once.
• Not to be a raving misandrist or anything, but I note that episodes 7-9, the best so far, were all written or co-written by women, and the upcoming 10th episode is written and directed by women. Good. Very good.
• Actually, I'd recommend taking a look at the Wikipedia list of writers and directors on this show, it's a really interesting selection. Obviously most of them have worked on vaguely similar shows (Torchwood, X-Files, Whedonverse, etc.) but did you know episode 4 was directed by B'Elanna Torres from Star Trek: Voyager??
• I can't tell if Skye's dobule-agent hacker status has been resolved yet. I guess maybe they're saving something for the finale?
• Did I mention how much I loved "Repairs"? Some of the scenes in that episode were seriously creepy. I wonder if Tobias the Stalker Ghost was ending up in Svartalfheim, or what?
• I think I already said this in one of my reviews, but I'd really appreciate a scene where we see one of the female characters fixing their hair and makeup. May and Skye both wear at least two shades of eyeshadow at all times, and Skye's hair looks incredibly high-maintenance. It would be refreshing to see a show like this acknowledge the work that goes into looking that good, instead of tacitly implying that women find it incredibly easy to look perpetually gorgeous while hacking into the Pentagon or flying a spy plane or whatever.
• Next week's episode involves Mike Peterson (J. August Richards' character in the pilot episode) in some kind of black leather superhero jumpsuit. You're welcome.

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Thor: The Dark World, Part 2: Female characters & representation.

Previously: Part 1, Heroes & Villains.

I was extremely careful not to read any spoilers before I saw this movie, which is just as well because it's VERY spoilery. The one thing I did see beforehand was part of a review that said Jane's role was mostly to "faint on cue", which made me rather apprehensive. There's probably going to be a lot of debate over this among fans, but I personally thought the depiction of women in Thor: TDW was very good. If Jane had been the only female character, I wouldn't have been pleased by the fact that she fainted a lot, but there are four women in this movie (one more than in The Avengers, which had a far larger ensemble cast), and each of them has an important role in their own right. On the simplest level, this is how representation works: the more women you have in your movie, the more leeway you have to let one of them be "weak" -- whatever that means.
Jane's characterisation is very solid thanks to the first movie, and I appreciate the number of publicity interviews Natalie Portman has done where she talks about strength of character vs. the concept of "strong female characters". Sif is a warrior. Frigga is an witch and a diplomat and a mother, who can fight if she has to. Jane is brave and curious and smart, but she's not a fighter. Darcy is independent and fun and "normal". All four of those characters are "emotional", but not in a way that's coded to make them seem hysterical/weepy/stupid, which is often how some people interpret "emotional" female characters. A female character who faints a lot sets off alarm bells because we associate it with swooning damsels in distress, but a female character who has no weaknesses is a more insidious problem. I suppose they probably could've done better than Jane being Maguffinised for half the movie, but I think it worked in the context of her being the mortal girlfriend of a near-indestructable alien, which I can only assume will be the primary conflict in the Thor/Jane romance storyline in any potential sequels.

Regarding Frigga, I am SO GLAD she got a more significant role, a role that really solidifies Asgard as a patriarchal society. A patriarchal society where leadership is determined by genetics, hence Odin's desire for Thor to start looking for a ~suitable~ wife rather than the sub-standard "goat", Jane. (Thank god there wasn't a real Jane/Thor/Sif love triangle, by the way. I LOVE SIF, and a love triangle would've been a complete fiasco.) I could've done with more Frigga/Loki scenes, but overall I thought she was a really satisfying depiction of a classic "woman behind the throne" character: someone who gains power within traditional femininity, whereas Sif is the warrior who fights to be part of the boys' club. Also, Frigga's death was a rare example of a mother/wife character being killed off, but not "fridged".
We were discussing this in the most recent episode of the Fandomspotting radio show/podcast, and everyone agreed that while we don't actually want Frigga to be dead, her death scene (and subsequent funeral) was satisfying, and definitely not an example of the "fridged female character" trope. Her funeral was one of the most beautiful scenes in the movie, and Thor and Loki's reactions to her death were engaging and complex. The difference between your average "MY WIFE IS DEAD!!" action movie and Thor: TDW is that with Thor and Loki, their reactions take into account their own personalities and relationship with Frigga, and her death wasn't immediately sidelined: it was brought into the foreground with this epic, Lord of the Rings-esque funeral. It was similar to Coulson's role in The Avengers, where a character's death is used as a catalyst to bring the heroes together against a common goal, but that dead character is developed beforehand rather than being two-dimensional or exploitative.
It's not a huge shock for a Marvel movie to be overwhelmingly white, even though Thor took a couple of baby-steps forward by casting Idris Elba as Heimdall. Still, I felt that this movie was actually a lot whiter than the first one, which is something that I don't even always pick up on unless it's pretty obvious. The thing that put me on edge in the first place was the absence of Hogun. He's introduced early on, but aside from his scene on Vanaheim he's basically benched for the rest of the movie. I originally assumed this was due to one of two reasons: either the actor was only available to film limited scenes (ie, only on the Vanaheim set), or he filmed more Vaneheim scenes that were cut from the final edit. Unfortunately, the director has recently stated that Hogun was written out for basically no good reason, which I find very disappointing.
The plan was apparently give each of the Warriors Three some "individual" moments, and for one to travel to his home world to thematically mirror Thor's decision to move to Earth at the end of the movie. But I guess they chose the Japanese guy to be an outsider who comes from a world that looks like a Mongolain grassland, because... of reasons...? This just does not come across as a good choice at all. I'm not sure if he actually gets much less screentime than, for example, Fandral. But Hogun's role in this movie functionally removes him from the central action, and characterises him as an outsider while Fandral and Volstagg hang out with Thor and Sif in Asgard. I can sort of understand wanting to bench one of the Warriors Three on another planet because there are too many characters in the story, or because they wanted to introduce one of the other Nine Realms. But since both Volstagg and Fandral are comic relief characters, and Hogun is one of the few non-white people in the movie, it was a bad decision to leave Hogun behind.

The eventual result is that of the three significant people of colour in Thor: TDW, Idris Elba gets an awesome role while Hogun vanishes offscreen and Christopher Ecclestone's elf husband puts on a mask on and turns into a giant beast-monster for the last two thirds of the movie. Collectively, this doesn't look great -- particularly when coupled with the addition of two extra white dude characters in the form of Richard (Jane's date, who I really enjoyed), and Ian the Intern. I don't have anything against Ian as a character, but his main purpose was to provide Darcy with someone to talk to, making him a perfect example of when casting just defaults to a generic-looking white man for no good reason. This kind of thing is particularly frustrating because in an ensemble movie like this, it shouldn't be hard to cast a more diverse range of side-characters, even when you're carrying over a predominantly white cast from the first movie. It came across as lazy writing and casting, and soured my opinion of a movie that I otherwise loved and found very entertaining.
Out of all the Marvel movies, Thor and Thor: TWD are the best at illustrating complex emotional themes and depicting interesting, human characters outside of the central superhero/love-interest duo. So it's all the more noticeable when they fail at racial diversity. Right now, my goal for Thor 3 is for it to be an Asgard/Nine Realms buddy movie, where Jane and Darcy get to come to Asgard. Thor, Hogun, Sif and Fandral go on adventures, while Volstagg stays home to cook and take care of the kids. Loki is partially redeemed, culminating in a Thor/Loki hug where at least one of them cries, and there's a subtle undercurrent of Sif/Loki romantic subtext throughout the movie. Also, someone makes an STD joke about Fandral, preferably Hogun. Ian disappears without trace. Perfect.

To be continued in Part 3...

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Thor: The Dark World, Part 1: Heroes and Villains.

SPOILER WARNING: There are spoilers for Thor: The Dark World throughout this post!

I recommend watching this movie back-to-back with Thor, as it really emphasises the way the two stories shift from personal character journey to sweeping epic. I watch A LOT of superhero movies, but this was probably the best graduation from origin story to sequel that I've seen so far. Thor is purposefully the reverse of your typical superhero character arc because instead of struggling with superpowers and learning how to become a hero, he's learning how to be a fallible human and not have superpowers. Even the obligatory daddy issues are far more interesting than usual, because Odin is an actual character rather than a long-dead ghost or an avatar of lofty paternal expectations.
Thor's unusually well-drawn characterisation means that there's a solid base on which to make The Dark World a sci-fi/fantasy epic with an ensemble cast, instead of just another superhero movie where the central character hits Bad Guys until they give up. I was also pleasantly surprised by how complex it was -- not that I'm suggesting it's a particularly deep and meaningful cinematic work, but more that it was one of the most unpredictable (and rewatchable) superhero movies I've seen so far. If you look at the Thor-Loki arc over the course of their three movies together, Thor is about Loki running rings around everyone because they're all straight-shooting warrior types. The Avengers is about Loki finally meeting his match, in the form of Black Widow (intellectually) and the Avengers themselves (because Friendship and Teamwork triumph over Evil, obviously). Finally we reach Thor: TDW, in which Thor has learned from his mistakes and manages to fool Loki himself.
I don't need to tell you what a gift Loki is as a character, but he's also a solid argument against the concept of disposable villains. The only comparable relationship is Charles Xavier and Magneto, but you don't really see them change to accommodate one another (partly thanks to the current chronology of the X-Men series), whereas you really see Thor getting smarter and more canny over the course of his three appearances so far. Not that he's smart enough, of course. Loki's triple bluff is a thing of beauty. But I loved the way the movie briefly turned into a heist story halfway through, with Thor and the Warriors Three orchestrating their elaborate escape plan.

Unless you've got Lex Luthor in your movie, villains are always the weak spot of the superhero genre. Villains, and the inevitable final battle sequence. (I'm looking at you, Iron Man, Captain America, every Spider-Man movie, and the final 14 hours of Man of Steel.) Luckily, this series has Loki, one of the most satisfying antagonists in recent blockbuster history. Any additional villains are basically window dressing by comparison, which is just as well because the clunkiest aspect of TDW was definitely Malekith, the Aether, and their attendant exposition scenes. Poor Christopher Eccleston. I don't have any particular problem with MacGuffins in general (after all, the entirety of Lord of the Rings is founded on a MacGuffin), but I suspect this movie may have suffered from cutting out some excess Malekith scenes along the way. He just wasn't very engaging. But even though Malekith was little more than a force for mindless destruction, that whole problem was obliterated by the presence of Loki and Odin.
In Thor, Odin was a pretty terrible father, but in a way that wasn't explicitly pointed out to the audience. Fans on Tumblr are definitely aware that Odin is a dick ("One day... one of you will be King, my sons." The Hunger Games of parenting!) but I'm reasonably sure that most average viewers just wrote him off as Anthony-Hopkins-as-Zeus. So I'm very happy that this time round, it was obvious that he's not a good guy at all, and not necessarily even a good king. Thor has matured beyond him, and thus Odin has become a kind of benevolent antagonist. In this context, having Malekith as a kind of ticking time-bomb in the background actually simplified the film and brought the interesting stuff (ie, Loki) into the foreground.

I'm quite surprised by this film's mixed reviews, because I felt that Malekith and the Aether was really its only major weakness. Looking at Rotten Tomatoes, a lot of the negative reviews seem to be thanks to superhero fatigue, which is fair enough because your average professional film critic is not as excited about Marvel movies as I am. However, not only did this movie mostly abandon the typical superhero formula, but it included something that's usually deemed far too complicated for the genre: multiple characters with conflicting yet believable motivations. Usually the most you can hope for is an ~ambiguous villain~ like Magneto, or Batman struggling with the moral dilemmas of vigilante justice. I find it baffling that last year's mediocre Spider-Man reboot received more positive reviews, when it followed the superhero formula to the letter, and was riddled with plot holes.
Another reason why rewatching Thor beforehand was so rewarding is that you get to see Loki's transformation in full. Thor's character development is, obviously, excellent, helped along by Chris Hemsworth being unfeasibly likeable in the role. But with Loki, the changes are beautifully drastic. In Thor, Tom Hiddleston is playful, childish, and overly emotional. He's an angry emo teenager who tries to burn down the school because nobody understands him. But since The Avengers, Loki has transformed into an exhausted, crazy-eyed murderer with papery skin. He's gone from being a doe-eyed sylph to a frazzle-haired angstbucket with a penchant for stabbing. It's beautiful. And, of course, he's an absolute scene-stealer. Ambiguous villainhood is all well and good, but Loki is endlessly entertaining because he's so goddamn hard to predict. You really do get the feeling that he's living from moment to moment, rather than following a carefully itemised Evil Overlord plan like most supervillains. I just wanna high-five Tom Hiddleston and the writers all the way through, both for creating such a fun character, and for developing such an interesting interpretation of Norse mythology.
By the end of the movie, it's equally easy to believe that as king, Loki could lead Asgard to ruin or restore it to its greatest triumphs. If they go the mythological route then the only way this can end is with Loki's destruction. But from a personal perspective, I think most of us want to see him if not actually redeemed, then at least appearing in Marvel movies ad infinitum.

Continued in Part 2:  Female characters and representation.

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Captain America vs. Agents of SHIELD.

I love the new trailer for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but I get the distinct impression that it's going to kick Agents of SHIELD in the balls. Without going into too much detail, AoS is suffering from a bizarre problem of portraying SHIELD agents as "the good guys" while having them do objectively terrible stuff like wiretapping, kidnapping and shooting civilians, and dumping American prisoners overseas with no money or ID. In most episodes so far, the antagonists have seemed more sympathetic (from a real-world standpoint) than the ostensibly likeable heroes, which is actually more confusing than the way SHIELD was depicted in The Avengers: ie, as an ethically ambiguous government agency, run by a decidedly shady individual. CA:TWS seems to be going the Avengers route with regards to SHIELD and Nick Fury, which is seriously going to screw with AoS's weirdly happy-go-lucky attitude towards acting like assholes in the name of homeland security.
This trailer is really promising on so many levels. Captain America has one of the few origin stories that I actually enjoy on its own merits, unlike Batman, Superman and Spider-Man, whose origin stories are all very overplayed. Cap appeals to me as a hero for the oppressed and downtrodden, in a way that I don't think is really covered by the other classic superheroes. A lot of his power is tied up in marketing and patriotism, which has the potential to be very subversive because he looks like this all-American cheerleader dude but Steve Rogers' own principles are a lot more liberal/socialist/anti-establishment than you might expect. There's a reason why there's a whole subgenre of fanfic dedicated to Steve Rogers in the 21st century, making public media statements in favour of LGBT rights and feminism, you know? So I'm really psyched to any possible hints of this in the trailer, including Cap walking past a giant banner of his own face. WHAT WAS THE PUBLIC REACTION TO AN AMERICAN ICON RETURNING FROM THE DEAD?

I didn't actually think much of Captain America as a film in itself. It's a great origin story and I loved the casting, but the central supervillain story is pretty dull, and the final third of the film is weak as a result. Overall I don't really rate it as highly as Iron Man or Thor, which is odd because I do love the concept. Which I guess is why I'm more prone to reading Captain America fic than Iron Man. The Iron Man movies basically give me what I want to see in Tony Stark's story, but what I wanted from a Captain America movie was way more focus on his pre-serum life in 1930s Brooklyn, his relationship with Bucky and the Howling Commandos, and the way he tackles becoming a public figure. For me, the most exciting moment in this trailer is when someone tells Cap that he "shaped this century". That line has a real ring of epic superheroism to it, in a way that the first Captain America movie never really managed.
The other main thing I'm looking forward to is the way this movie links to the aftermath of The Avengers. Iron Man 3 did this to a certain extent, but it was definitely focusing inwards on Tony Stark's own problems, whereas this movie is an ensemble cast featuring Black Widow and Nick Fury in fairly prominent roles. Also Falcon, who I am looking forward to SO MUCH, oh my god. Falcon!! I was surprised to realise that after watching this trailer, I was actually more excited by the appearance of Falcon than the hints of the Bucky/Cap storyline? I don't even know why. I guess Anthony Mackie is just that charming.

Some more deep & meaningful thoughts

• This movie may as well be called Captain America: Blue Steel. Chris Evans' face is so ridiculously sculpted and pouty, what the hell. PLUS: snazzy new modern haircut. CAPTAIN AMERICA IS A SUPERMODEL. Or an action figure. A perfectly sculpted action figure with frosted tips and an unrealistically exaggerated waist-to-shoulder ratio.
• Actually, maybe a better title would be Captain America: Red, White and Blue Steel. But whatevs.
• I'm quite impressed by the way this trailer told us ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the actual plot, and yet still managed to be really intriguing and exciting? 
• TWO helicarriers? Steady on.
• God, I hope there's a A LOT of sassy, bitchy Cap in this movie. People keep thinking he's stolid because he's so moral and heroic, but Cap dialogue can totally be deadpan and hilarious.
• Cap and Black Widow are bros. This is giving me life.
• I'm not wild about Black Widow's straight hair but this doesn't matter at all because Black Widow is amazing and deserves twelve of her own movies, stat.
• Speaking of Black Widow, is Scarlett Johannson the only woman in this movie? IN THE WORLD? I counted 973 men in this trailer but only one gurl. Step it up, Marvel. 
• There's gonna be a scene where Steve tragically draws pictures of all his dead friends, right? Right?

PREVIOUSLY: If there's no such thing as a Captain America venereal disease PSA, I'm gonna be so disappointed.

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Only Lovers Left Alive: The one movie you MUST see next year.

Note: There are no plot spoilers in this post! I was going to hold off until the movie was on general release, but apparently that's not until Spring 2014 and I just couldn't wait.

I can't overemphasise how much I loved this movie. For sheer entertainment value it's tied with Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing for my favourite film of 2013, but it wins out in terms of sheer oddness and originality. The premise is already brilliant (Tilda Swinton! And Tom Hiddleston! As a pair of immortal vampire lovers!) but the plethora of promotional clips and images can't prepare you for what the film is actually like. Most notably, the fact that OLLA is genuinely -- and intentionally -- hilarious. I was lucky enough to see it at the BFI Festival in London this weekend, and the entire audience was laughing all the way through, often loud enough to drown out some of the dialogue. It's a delightful, sly kind of humour. Not remotely based on the kind of horror movie homage jokes you might expect from a movie that falls into the genre of "vampire romance".

Eve (Tilda Swinton) and Adam (Tom Hiddleston) in Tangier.

OLLA avoids almost all cinema tropes associated with vampires, which is pretty impressive when you consider that people have been making vampire movies since the birth of cinema. Obviously the film retains some essential aspects -- blood-drinking, avoidance of sunlight -- but they're treated quite casually. There's also a noticeable absence of the kind of sexual/romantic vampirism tropes we're used to seeing, with the main vampire characters acting less like voracious, eternally youthful predators, and more like lethargic intellectual shut-ins. The focus is on Adam and Eve's relationship, and how their lives are shaped by immortality.

At one point Eve's little sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) tells Adam and Eve that they're snobs: an accurate but not necessarily insulting summation. Eve is constantly surrounded by books, and her best friend is Christopher Marlowe -- another vampire, heralded by multiple Shakespeare jokes because director Jim Jarmusch is a Marlowe conspiracy theorist in real life. When you're several centuries old, you can't really avoid becoming an intellectual elitist, with our immortal vampire protagonists becoming understandably condescending towards humanity. While the word "vampire" is never actually uttered onscreen, Adam refers to humans as "zombies", depressed by the repetitive nature of their stupidity and destructiveness. But despite all the ageless hipsterism, it's Adam and Eve's mutual love of knowledge and new experiences that keeps them going. This may be an undead romance that takes place entirely at night, but it's still a very warm and affectionate film. As Eve explains to her husband when he's feeling low, "Life is about appreciating nature, surviving things, nurturing friendship, kindness, and dancing."

Of course Only Lovers Left Alive is a romance: it's right there in the title. I just wish there were more love stories like this in mainstream cinema. I love romance, but most "romantic" movies either weigh me down with dismally stereotyped gender roles, or are way too serious and depressing. Both problems caused by the genre being seen as girly and frivolous, unless it's couched in hours of agony, betrayal, and deceit. OLLA is a story about two people who find each other endlessly charming and appealing, which is a bizarrely rare occurrence in romantic movies. Most of the time, love stories are told from the beginning, or during a time of upheaval and strife. But with Adam and Eve, we're just getting a glimpse into the middle of an incredibly longstanding and complex relationship that could potentially last forever.
In that way, it may be the most romantic movie I've ever seen. Both characters have this immense fascination with each other, but it's completely relaxed and balanced, each accepting the other's faults. Not to mention the comforting physicality between the actors, who spend most of the movie draped all over each other. They have chemistry in a way that's oddly difficult to describe, because it's so rare to see a movie where the central romantic couple just lie around on top of each other all the time without it turning into a sex scene. When I first saw the above image of Swinton and Hiddleston together I assumed it was a one-off, but in fact every one of their scenes is like that -- and somehow, it never becomes saccharine or awkward.

Adam
Apparently Jim Jarmusch sold this role to Tom Hiddleston as "Hamlet, as played by Syd Barrett", which I find pretty hilarious because that description is Tom Hiddleston catnip. The character is perfect for him: the ideal comedy role for an actor who's known for Shakespearean angst and tortured antiheroes. And yes, he's very funny. Both Eve and the film itself have this wonderfully affectionate yet mocking attitude towards his depressive, angsty nature. It's not exactly a parody of sad goth moping, but it's not far off. He is truly suicidal, and it's presented as a serious aspect of his character, but it's offset by the fact that he's the archetypal misanthropic artist. Lurking in a house full of antique musical instruments, he accidentally spurs on his own cult-like fanbase of music nerds by refusing to have any contact with the outside world.
It's a long time since I was in a fully fledged vampire phase, but I still retain a real love of gothic media. And believe me, this movie is as goth as they come. Adam lives in a deserted house on the outskirts of bombed-out Detroit, wears nothing but black, and languishes in a permanent state of emo sulk. He's a beautiful study of the reclusive artistic genius, his human hanger-on Ian (Anton Yelchin) constantly in awe of his effortless cool -- which is mostly generated by his impenetrably self-absorbed, depressive nature, and love of wearing dark glasses at night. There's a scene where he plays Paganini's Caprice No. 5 on violin, while wearing an antique velvet dressing gown. Good luck finding anything more beautifully gothic than that.

Eve
There are some famous actors who only ever play parts who look like themselves. The worst examples I can think of are Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, who both suffer from a combination of the Tim Burton Curse and having very eccentric dress sense in real life. Helena Bonham Carter's costumes in Les Miserables and The Lone Ranger are virtually identical to her clothes in real life, making it too difficult to differentiate between the actor and the character she's playing. And to a certain extent, Tilda Swinton does sometimes fall into that category. The difference is that she's a good enough actor to carry it off, even if there have been occasions when she dressed like Jadis the White Witch in real life. Her red carpet fashion choices may sometimes look like movie costumes, but that doesn't mean for a second that you don't wholly believe in her performance.
Eve's costumes were simultaneously Swintonesque and perfect for her onscreen character. Swinton likes to wear a lot of draped, tailored robes and suits, with an emphasis on fabric choices and very little reference to current fashion trends -- ie, very similar to Eve in terms of superficial appearance. Eve's clothes reflected her way of combining the timeless (embroidered robes) with the modern (pale suede skinny jeans), which contrasted with Adam's uniform of black jeans/black t-shirt, which he may well have been wearing for the past forty years. Their respective costume choices seemed to play around with the two characters' relationship with time, since Adam is (unintentionally) far more concerned with present-day events, while Eve sort of skates past without getting truly invested.
Eve's character may have superficial connections with the 21st century in the form of an iPhone and a modern-looking jacket, but being played by Tilda Swinton helps a great deal when it comes to seeming ageless and otherworldly. I also noticed that she looked a lot more contemporary in scenes when she'd be seen by humans, such as traveling on the plane (as a posh-looking middle-aged lady), or hanging out at a nightclub (where she and Adam wore their matching sunglaasses and leather gloves). Otherwise, she wears robes or gowns, unable to pin down to any fixed location or time period. Adam, on the other hand, is tied down by a huge collection of material possessions, obsessed with antique musical instruments and wearing clothes that immediately characterise him as a rock musician -- even if that's the one thing he doesn't want to be.

Aside from Adam and Eve, the rest of the costuming is minimal because the rest of the cast is minimal. Mia Wasikowska's character wears a girly babydoll dress that immediately sets her apart from the mature appearance of her sister Eve, while Anton Yelchin is a typical slouchy rocker dude, with a drawling voice to match. At one point John Hurt's Christopher Marlowe was supposedly wearing a 500-year-old waistcoat, but my favourite detail for his character was his crutches, which I believe (?) was a reference to the real Christopher Marlowe having a lame or broken leg.
If there's any justice in the world, Only Lovers Left Alive will end up with a serious cult following. Not only does it manage the near-impossible feat of being a fresh take on the vampire genre, but the worldbuilding is deliciously deep and rich compared to most movies aimed at a horror/fantasy audience. It really makes me wish that more so-called art filmmakers were willing to work with "genre" fiction rather than rejecting it as populist nonsense. Despite being a movie about culture snobs, OLLA disproves one of the favourite myths of current pop culture snobbery: that "paranormal romance" is purely the realm of shallow and frivolous storytelling. It's a complex and beautiful love story, blood-drinking and all.

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Agents of SHIELD: Eye Spy.

Previously on Agents of SHIELD: The Asset.

This week's episode didn't really have enough... content... to deserve a full review. So! Have some bullet points.

• Clark Gregg really was performing at maximum Cute Dad status in this one, wasn't he?
• I can't tell if Skye's incredibly awkward ~emotional bonding~ dialogue is just bad writing, or if she's purposefully trying to get on Coulson's good side in order to better infiltrate SHIELD. Either way, this show still appears to think that it's OK for characters to literally narrate their character development directly to the audience??
• If Skye is trying to infiltrate SHIELD by getting all friendly with Coulson, I assume that Coulson will see through it. Then, in the finale, there'll be a revelation scene where he's all, "I'm disappointed in you, Skye," and then she'll decide to side with SHIELD after all. Coulson always plays the long game.
• Agent Ward was marginally less dull than usual. Partly because the glasses gave him a distinguishing feature so he could avoid looking like a walking mannequin.

• I read some interview with the actor who plays Ward, where he said he'd been given advice by Nathan Fillion on how to navigate being a central actor in a Whedonverse TV show. As in, how to tackle being passionately loved by thousands of superfans. But seriously: this guy is NOT Nathan Fillion, and AoS is only barely a Whedonverse show. It's Whedon-adjacent, at best. And Agent Ward is the kind of square-jawed personality vaccuum that would only show up in shows like Buffy or Firefly so the main characters could make fun of them.
  
• When Ward was tying to talk about girls with the security guard guy, I think it would've been pretty funny if the guard had just looked at him, completely stone-faced, and said, "No, I'm gay." That's a good gay joke, not, "Haha, the straight guy has to ~seduce a man." It would've turned the tables on Skye's comment about the guard being straight because he looked like a slob -- particularly since Ward is the most clean-shaven and in-shape guy ever, and is almost certainly straight himself.

• Was anyone else really disappointed when the weird mask dudes turned out to just be transporting diamonds? Particularly since the crowds didn't seem to be reacting to them NEARLY as much as they should've been. Honestly, I thought the first couple of minutes of this episode were VERY Doctor Who, including the music. The revelation that it was all about diamonds made the whole thing seem totally banal, after that. Particularly since having a crowd of guys in masks walk through a major public thoroughfare is a completely stupid way of keeping your diamonds safe.
• That being said, I think the secret eyeball spy people are the first genuinely interesting antagonist we've had so far.
• Did anyone keep their eyes open during the eye surgery scene? Anyone? Anyone? 

Do they all go to the same SHIELD hairstylist, or what? They look like triplets.

• THANK GOD Melinda May finally got something to do in this episode. I could've done with more interactions between her and Akela, though. Obviously. I'd like to imagine that Akela will be back in later episodes, but TBH that seems pretty unlikely.
• Are they spending all the budget on location shoots, or what??
• I really hope they go a little further with the whole FitzSimmons business. Have you noticed that Coulson actually refers to them in the singular, as if FitzSimmons is one entity rather than a nickname given to two people? SHARED CONSCIOUSNESS, PLEASE.

This episode was reasonably entertaining overall, but the dialogue is still weak, and the worldbuilding/character backstory is still nonexistent. NOT WEIRD ENOUGH. NOT INTERESTING ENOUGH. More detail, for the love of god.

The pitch for Agents of SHIELD was a show about the ordinary background humans of the Marvel movie universe. The normal folks like Coulson, who get the job done, but don't get much credit or media attention. The general expectation was that we were getting a slice-of-life show, but in a slightly weirder world than our own. Instead, Coulson's team are (STILL) a collection of overly simplistic cliche characters, who we barely ever see doing anything more "normal" than eating a snack and playing poker on their zillion-dollar secret airplane. The scientists have multiple PhDs before the age of 25! There's a cute young hacker! Both the agents are stoic and badass! Please. Rather than going for the personal angle, AoS is relying on single-episode storylines that just aren't smart enough to measure up to shows like Torchwood, The Middleman, or even the X-Files. To put it bluntly: it's bland.

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The Fifth Estate: Don't. Just, don't.

It often feels kinda cheap to ~review a movie just to tear it apart, but OH MY GOD The Fifth Estate was so terrible that I need to do this for catharsis purposes. And also to warn you that unless you're a die-hard Cumberbatch fan, you need to avoid this movie like the plague. Even the graphics over the intro credits were bizarrely cheesy -- ironically enough, since there's actually a scene in the movie where Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Bruhl, doing his best with some bad material) makes fun of Julian Assange for using shitty graphics during an early Wikileaks presentation. The overall tone was that of an early-2000s TV movie with an inexplicably high budget for casting world-famous actors in meaningless supporting roles.
To give you an idea of what you're in for if you do masochistically decide to watch this movie: it includes an actual scene where ~hacker code~ is projected across Benedict Cumberbatch's face while he types. JUST LIKE A CYBERPUNK MOVIE FROM 15 YEARS AGO. For real. If you were to ask me, What's the worst possible cliche you could include in a supposedly-serious movie about hackers? I'd answer immediately: code being projected across someone's face while they type. For those of you who have managed to miss out on this classic ~cyber~ movie detail, it was used during the hacking scene in Jurassic Park. Which came out in 1993. Not only this, but there's also at least one scene where Assange and Daniel Berg communicate via chat, while on opposite sides of the same table, and you see the chat scrolling across the screen and spoken in a voiceover at the same time. Needless to say, the chat is full of perfect grammar and punctuation, which as we all know is exactly how people communicate on the internet.

I'm not going to go into whether Benedict Cumberbatch managed a "realistic" portrayal of Julian Assange, because I generally think that there's more to biopic acting than just doing a super-accurate impersonation. Let's just say that Cumberbatch's performance was one of the only good aspects of the movie, and that the interpretation of Assange as an egotistical liar felt pretty accurate. It was the other characters that were the problem.

Most decent biopics fall into one of two categories: entertainingly fictionalised, or slavishly well-researched. The Fifth Estate had the potential to be a political thriller or a serious character study of Julian Assange, but it fell somewhere in between and ended up being neither. The dialogue was cheesy as hell, but the events themselves seemed relatively accurate, along with pointless but noticeable details like Assange's clothes and Domscheit-Berg's laptop. The worst result of this clash between ~realism and entertainment was the enormous cast of accomplished character-actors, who were all disastrously underutilised. You ended up sitting through a seemingly never-ending stream of "hey it's that guy!" scenes, but instead of seeing any actual characterisation or drama, it would just be Anthony Mackie and Peter Capaldi and David Thewlis reciting godawful TV-movie dialogue to each other yet again. There is literally a scene where Stanley Tucci and Laura Linney (both US government officials) have this painfully embarrassing exchange:

Laura Linney: These computer geeks are more dangerous than we ever could have predicted, Jim.

Stanley Tucci: Welcome to the revolution!

Yes, they really did use the phrase "computer geeks". 

Worse still is the depiction of women. I don't have any particular problem with fictionalising real people to make a biopic more interesting, which is just as well because The Fifth Estate was clearly fictionalising a lot. There is no way those characters could be that boring and cliched in real life. Unfortunately, the filmmakers were fictionalising for all the wrong reasons, particularly when it came to female characters. Laura Linney was OK, but every other woman in the film was like some godawful 1950s stereotype, from nagging girlfriends to background secretaries to worried to mothers to the gaggles of interchangeable one-line Assange groupies. Meanwhile, there were about a million scenes where groups of white men stood around exchanging portentious dialogue about Hacking or whatevs. Noooope.
Daniel Berg's girlfriend ended up with the worst depiction of all, reduced to a friendly office girl who (inexplicably) falls for him and then spends the rest of the movie either lying in bed waiting for a sex scene, or nagging him about how dinner's getting cold. Literally nagging him about how dinner is getting cold. If you google this woman IRL, her Twitter bio reads: "Open Government, freedom + transparency activist, chairwoman Pirate Party Brandenburg, Eastern Germany-socialized feminist." I know Julian Assange had a hissy-fit about this movie being a hatchet job, but TBH I think this woman has way more to complain about.
For the rest of the agony, I'm just gonna give you a bullet-point list. This movie includes such a rich and diverse array of shittiness that I can't face going into any more detail.

• At least 70% of the dialogue was expository.
• ... including multiple scenes where characters read newspaper articles or websites out loud to each other.
• Seemingly unintentional allusions to dated cyberpunk movie tropes, ie secreal scenes in a Berlin squatter club full of punks and hippies, prseumably to give the illusion that hackers are, like, so cool, man.
• Were they trying to make the "hacker conference" scenes look cool? Or were they making fun of hacker conferences for trying to look cool? I genuinely could not tell. 
• Constant jump-cuts to new locations, with the city name scrawled across the screen in vaguely ~computery~ typeface.
•  The only excuse for this many montages is if you're including a teen-movie-style makeover scene. Unfortunately, that never happened.
• A scene where Cumberbatch was forced to deliver dialogue that sounded exactly like something from Sherlock. ie, "What must it be like to think like these boring, pedestrian idiots?" etc. One of the many, many times we started laughing out loud in the cinema. TERRIBLE.
• They completely failed to point out the irony of Assange's obsession with covering up his personal life/the inner workings of Wikileaks. Considering the fact that the movie was colossally unsubtle in every other area, I'm gonna go ahead and assume that they just... didn't bother with this really obvious angle??
• Noticeably terrible cinematography that coincidentally means you can't drink to dull the pain of the rest of the movie, because you'll just end up nauseated.

At its most basic level, The Fifth Estate failed to be entertaining and failed to be anything remotely resembling a thoughtful portrayal of a very complex story. Despite the fact that there were at least ten scenes where characters literally stood around explaining what was going on, it was as if the movie expected us to know everything already. Which isn't too unreasonable, because most people going to a Wikileaks movie probably know the vague outline of the narrative already. But it sure as hell made for some boring viewing.
P.S. In the interests of balance, there was one non-terrible aspect to this film: Alexander Siddig. The only character I actually cared about, partly because he was played by Alexander Siddig and partly because his story was more human than anyone else's. If The Fifth Estate had included more scenes where Laura Linney helped Alexander Siddig flee across the Egyptian border and fewer scenes where people stood around explaining what Wikileaks was, then it would've been significantly less unbearable to watch.

P.P.S. I expect this movie was meant to be thought-provoking, but the main question I find myself asking is: Does Julian Assange really dye his hair?

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Costume design TED Talk: From Clothing to Character. (Plus some notes on Sleepy Hollow.)

I thought some of you guys might be into this: A TED Talk about costume design! Kristin Burke is a pro costume designer and has a lot to say about the way costumes influence our perceptions of characters onscreen. Which, as you probably know, is my #1 favourite topic. It's an interesting talk, and the YouTube comments are still at the stage where no one is having a flamewar about Hitler, and someone has actually asked a pretty sensible question, ie: "HOW DID SHE GET OUT OF THE TRUCK?" (... Now you have to watch the video to find out how she got into the truck.)



I actually found out about this video because I follow Kristin Burke on Twitter (@frocktalk), so I've also noticed that she designs the costumes for the Sleepy Hollow TV series. A job which seems to involve being very patient with the hundreds of people who are obsessed with whether or not Ichabod Crane (an 18th century time traveler, more or less) is ever going to change his clothes.
So many Sleepy Hollow fans are fixating on this detail that I've even had a few messages about it myself, despite the fact that I haven't even watched past the pilot episode. I'm afraid I'm not gonna start recapping Sleepy Hollow, but I will repost my thoughts on Ichabod Crane's costume:
Obviously I'm psyched that people are paying attention to the costumes in this show. But! I don't really think it's valid to criticise the showrunners/designers for having Ichabod wear the same outfit in every episode. Off the top of my head, here are just a few reasons why this is the case: 

1. People in the 18th century didn’t change clothes as much as people in the 21st century. Back home, he was probably used to wearing the same clothes for weeks on end, just washing undershirts every couple of days.
2. As soon as he starts wearing modern-day clothes, he’ll immediately start looking like a modern-day guy with a ponytail. The show needs to keep him in the 18th century costume for more than a couple of episodes, purely to remind the audience that he’s from the 18th century. It’s a visual cue.
3. Changing into 21st century clothes is likely to be an Important Moment in the show, because it’ll prove that he’s truly adapting to modern society. Most likely, they’ll ease him in with some old-fashioned-looking modern clothes.
4. Costume designers are not idiots. They almost certainly know way more about the historical period than the audience does. Part of their job is to do as much research as possible, and any changes to the ~accuracy~ of the costumes will be for practical reasons, such as characterisation, storytelling, or budget.

Sometimes, historical "accuracy" should be ignored in favour of making the end product as comprehensible and entertaining as possible.

See also: A fan's introduction to costume design.

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Agents of SHIELD: The Asset.

PREVIOUSLY: Agents of SHIELD, 0-8-4.

This episode was super important because it guest-starred our first Harry Potter crossover actor, future supervillain Professor Quirrell. Definitely a step up from last week, because the science maguffin was way more central to the overall plot. Last week's gamma bomb was kind of embarrassing because they made it out to be this catastrophically big deal, but in the end Fitz just used it to blow a six-foot hole in the side of the plane. Sure, "Gravitonium" is a silly name, but the whole Big Whirring Gadget/evil Tony Stark-alike idea is a classic sci-fi plot, and this show works best when it's playing around with familiar genre cliches. "The Asset" managed a decent balance between sci-fi ridiculousness, heist shenanigans, and character development. Way better than last week's decidedly transparent excuse to get the team to bond during their first mission.

The only problem with the underground bunker/pseudoscience schtick is that I end up comparing Agents of SHIELD to The Middleman... and AoS does not measure up. Which is kind of a bummer, because Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen are good writers, and AoS has the whole weight of Marvel behind it. Meanwhile, The Middleman had about a fraction of the audience, no well-known actors in the main cast, and was still snappier, funnier, and more consciously genre-savvy -- while still being goofy and child-friendly. I'm still enjoying AoS, but the backstory development and worldbuilding is disappointingly slow-paced and lacking in detail. Plus, they need to dial back Ward's screentime by about 90% and replace him with more Melinda May, for real.
Skye is becoming more and more likeable with each episode, mostly because they seem to be emphasising how young she is. The one thing I really DON'T want is for her and Ward to end up as a couple, particularly since he's now taking on a mentor role. Wouldn't it be great if Skye was just characterised as the immature teenager of the group, and Ward continued to be her mentor with no sexual tension whatsoever? Of course, it's possible that there's no romantic tension whatsoever, and I'm just reading into this because we're trained to expect ~romance between two characters like Skye and Ward. Sadly, I don't know if this show is smart enough to buck that trend. Unless they make some seriously shocking changes (ie, Ward turning out to be evil; Skye going full-on Rising Tide terrorist halfway through the season), any kind of Skye/Ward romance plotline will be a heteronormative yawnfest.

I was glad to see this episode focusing on one of my favourite topics: the unethical nature of SHIELD itself. It's just too bad that I can't tell which side the writers are trying to get us to support. In the Skye/Quinn scenes, they did the thing where the villain points out a bunch of completely true and accurate criticisms of the "good guys", but we're meant to discredit him because he's evil. A bit of ambiguity is a good thing, but it felt a lot like the scene went slightly too far and ended up characterising SHIELD as the bad guys.
If you look at the events surrounding Quinn, Dr Hall and the gravity device, SHIELD does not come out looking like a force for good. First of all, Dr Hall is functionally a prisoner when he's working for SHIELD: miserable, lonely, and transported around like dangerous cargo. Quinn is amoral and greedy, and frees Dr Hall for his own ends, but all Dr Hall wants is to do the right thing. He wants to destroy the gravity device, and save the world from further screw-ups -- from both Quinn and SHIELD. Dr Hall distrusts SHIELD so much that after years of working for them, he's willing to sacrifice his own life to avoid them getting their hands on dangerous technology.
Dr Hall aimed to sacrifice himself and Quinn's lackeys/shareholders in order to prevent more disastrous consequences. In turn, Coulson sacrificed Dr Hall in order to save his own team and everyone else in the building. The end result is that SHIELD now has another hugely dangerous secret weapon under its control, and has just helped create a new supervillain (even if they don't know abuot it yet). I'm not saying that SHIELD are 100% bad, or that they don't save people's lives... but they're doing some massively unethical stuff, and I don't think the show is working very hard at discussing this in an intelligen way. Plus, everything Quinn said about SHIELD targeting Skye's weaknesses is true. SHIELD is not the nice Big Brother: it's creepy as fuck.

Miscellaneous

• The agent that Coulson speaks to at the end of the episode was in The Avengers! Agent Tyler.
• But why, in a show where half the main castmembers are white men, are they airing episodes where all the main guest actors (Quinn; Dr Hall; the SHIELD agent trucker) are also white men?
• We're three episodes in, and Melinda May has still not really been given anything to do??
• More scenes where Coulson picks out suits, please.
• Agent Fitz eating popcorn! Luv FitzSimmons. LUV THEM.
• IDK about you guys, but I was totally fine with the line where Fitz suggests that Skye distracted Quinn with her boobs? I don't really feel like it devalued her, particularly since one of the main reasons she probably blended into the Malta party was because she's a hot girl, and hot girls are essentially invisible in a lot of situations because people assume they're just there for decorative purposes.
• Skye's hair and makeup are gorgeous, but I'd feel happier if we actually saw her working on them, rather than her just being another effortlessly gorgeous TV beauty queen.
• Ward has got to be one of the blandest characters I have ever seen. He's so bland I don't even dislike him as much as I did last week. I can't muster the energy. (Commentary from @queerly_it_is: "I can't decide if it's a sad accident or some kind of meta statement about white male hero characters." WORD.)
• Coulson continues to be the main highlight. The whole ~muscle memory~ thing was about 30 miles away from subtlety, but I don't really give ashit. Clark Gregg is awesome in this role, and right now his performance is saving the show from tipping over into sheer stupidity.
• I really enjoyed the opening scene. The trucker-guy agent gave us a fun look into the variety of jobs SHIELD has to offer.
• Let's watch Chloe Bennet's music video from when she was a minor pop star in China, and still went by Chloe Wang!

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